John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

— Elections?

She shrugged. — Elections. The town council no-accounts. She winked.

— I’m not registered.

She clucked brightly, waving a hand. — We’ll take care of that first, then.

— I’m not going into town yet.

— Oskar.

— Yes?

She paused a moment, looking at him looking back at her. Her expression softened. — Suit yourself, then.

As he heard her footfalls on the gravel his breath came easier to him. His worn face had shocked her. He’d sent photographs but those were now years out of date. One of the house, one of the horses. One of himself and Anna, taken on the occasion of their third anniversary. He went into the parlor to look for them.

The parlor gave no sign that so much as a saucer had been shifted those twenty-odd years. The watercolors hung palely in their gilt-edged frames on three sides of the dining table and the table itself was covered by a dust-heavy cloth. It had the smell of a room long since sealed against time, shut away and forgotten, though he knew she must pass through it daily to reach the verandah. A line of wash was strung through the open door and he recognized his own linen dangling from it, steaming in the midmorning sun. He sat himself down with the sun at his back and his feet on the warm clay tiles and spread open a folio of photographs.

The folio held several bundles of varying sizes randomly bound together. He undid the twine from each bundle and organized them into heaps, oldest to newest, along the yellow-glazed wall of the verandah. The first to catch his eye was a large overexposed picture of his father on the steps of the opera in a wide-brimmed fedora and a loden jacket, pointing at the ground. On the back of the photograph the words “new shoes” were scrawled in his father’s crimped, fastidious hand. A woman who might or might not have been Maman stood laughing in the middle distance, waving a patterned shawl.

In the next picture she was more clearly visible. She stood frowning at the camera in mock displeasure, the playful curl of her lips wholly alien to his conception of her. In the third his father had removed his fedora and sat cross-legged on the steps, grinning and gesturing at the sky with his baton. On its back he had written “the fool.” Voxlauer looked at this picture for a long time, trying to imagine his mother and Père’s life before his birth, before she’d left the opera, before Père had stopped composing and become ill. He thought of their slow, courtly promenades along the canal, acknowledging the greetings of the passersby, and tried to imagine them much younger still, on a similar walk in Arnstadt, or in Teplitz-Schönau, or in Berlin. But the memory of Père in his last year came to him instead, as it always did: on his bench in the farthest corner of the orchard, hollowed out and unsure of his surroundings, aged beyond measure by his sickness and by the slow corruption of everything, the murders of the Kaiserin and of Archduke Ferdinand, the workers’ strikes and the revolutions and the Kaiser’s own idiocies and lastly, most of all, by the unforeseeable vastness of the war. Voxlauer laid the print down carefully by its edges.

There followed in the pile a number of photographs well known to him of Maman in various of the roles she had performed in the years before her marriage, carefully composed publicity shots taken against a painted drop of Grecian tombs and arbors. La Bohème, Turandot, La Traviata. Names he’d been entranced by as a child. The gilt edges of the daguerreotypes muddied and discolored by thumbprints. Maman at seventeen, barely distinguishable behind crepe veils and sequins in a large-scale cast portrait for Aída. The opera house in Arnstadt, weather-stained and somber. A picture of his father visibly older and ill-of-health, reclining in a loose-fitting summer shirt on the verandah — fifty years of age, possibly a little more, reading to him from a tattered paper copy of James Fenimore Cooper’s Pioneers.

Later he found the pictures of Anna taken on the farm and at the market in Cherkassy. In the first she was in front of the house, her face to the hard, flat sun, the bright puddles of snow-thaw behind her bleeding into her outline. Her hair hung in two thick plaits and shone warmly through the sepia of the print. Her plain straight mouth was open slightly, as though she’d been talking as he fidgeted with the borrowed camera, and her hands were clasped tightly at her waist. In the photograph from Cherkassy they stood an arm’s length apart, both regarding the camera suspiciously, as though it were an unwelcome witness to their happiness. His cheeks were drawn and sunken from his vagrancy and his beard was growing in uneven, downy patches, like an adolescent’s or a beggar’s. Already these photographs, too, were taking on the quality of publicity shots for a wholly imaginary life. And this parlor and verandah which in past years he’d not been capable of remembering clearly formed the model again for all he knew or understood, as it had from his earliest days.

Sometime past noon he fell asleep on the carpet. When he awoke he found that a blanket had been draped over him and a half-opened snowbell set on a kerchief near his head. Maman’s voice and the voice of another woman carried through the hallway and across the open stairwell.

— The wages of immodesty.

— What was it exactly?

— Liver.

— Ah. The liver. I see.

The woman’s voice was high and reedy and cut into his mother’s even tones like a schilling cast into a puddle of water. It seemed familiar to Voxlauer but he made no effort to place it. He listened to them awhile discussing him and his prospects in town as he might have listened to news of a foreign disaster on the radio, or as a child half-asleep listens to the talk of adults at ease and smoking after dinner. He drew the blanket over his head.

— I never once gave my approval of the “arrangement,” as he called it.

— What became of the first man?

— I haven’t the slightest. Liver most likely.

— Now Dora.

A brief pause. The sound of tea being poured, and the smell of it. He was still very tired and allowed himself to drift in and out of waking with their talk always liminally addressing him along the seams and the margins of his memory.

— Like a Bolshevik, with that face of his.

— Yes. Well, you definitely should shave him before bringing him to anybody.

— Ach, Irma. As if he’d once let me near him.

— Well. A silence. — Where will you take him, then?

— I don’t know. Herbst’s.

— With that face? In a gasthaus?

— He’s a good boy for all that. They know our family still, in town, I believe.

— Of course they do, Dora. There’s nothing to say in that regard.

— And they remember him, too, some of them.

Another pause. — Some of them do, yes.

— Paul Ryslavy does.

— He’s been away so long, Dora. And with the Russians the whole while.

— Because of that woman. She cursed quietly. — That turnip picker.

— Well.

— What?

— Well, Dora—

— It was cancer of the liver, said Voxlauer, stepping in from the stairwell.

— You’ll never guess who I saw today, Maman said cheerily, reaching past him for the soap brick. — At the elections.

— Who?

— Sister Milnitsch. She looked over at him. — Kati.

— No. Is Kati a Dominikanerin now?

— These twenty years.

Voxlauer let out a low whistle. — I must have made quite an impression on her.

— Ha! Don’t flatter yourself, Oskar.

— Well. I’m only saying. He wrung out the dish towel and took three chipped Meissen saucers from her. — Let them out now, do they?

— Only at elections. They drive them down the hill in one of the bishop’s cars. Drive them back up when they’re finished.